Report: Warren Symposium 2012

URL: https://sites.google.com/site/warrensymposium/home

On Semptember 21st and 22nd, a symposium titled “Logic Programming: Systems and Applications” took place in Stony Brook, NY. The event was organized by Michael Kiefer and Anne Liu, as an opportunity to celebrate David S. Warren’s retirement from SUNY Stony Brook University.

The symposium brought together a number of experts in logic programming, covering the wide range of theory, systems, and applications. The program was brilliantly organized to enable a combination of presentations and open discussions (in the form of panels of experts). The panels provided the participants with the opportunity of engaging in exciting discussions.

The first day of the symposium opened with a welcome from Yacov Shamash (Dean) and Arie Kaufman (Chair of the Computer Science Department at SUNY Stony Brook). The rest of the day was organized in topical sessions – each session included both extended and short presentations, followed by a panel discussion. The following sessions took were presented:

  • Theory and Practice of true declarative Programming (David S. Warren, Jeffrey Ullman, Molham Aref, Terrance Swift, Vitor Santos Costa, Neng-Fa ZHou and Kostis Sagonas)
  • Extensions of the Logic Programming paradigm (Benjamin Grosof, Georg Gottlob, Manuel Hermenegildo, Gopal Gupta and C.R. Ramakrishnan)
  • Expanding the Application Domains (Luiz Pereira, Krzysztof Apt, Veronica Dahl, Prasad Rao, Enrico Pontelli and Bharat Jayaraman).

The day concluded with a great banquet, with lots of anecdotes and recollections of David’s career and entertainment offered by Veronica Dahl.

The second day of the Symposium saw the participants breaking into different groups to discuss the three topics of Advancing the state of the art in LP theory, in LP systems and in LP applications. Each group met for 30 minutes, and presented the results of the discussions to the wide audience. This led to a flow of ideas and lively discussions.

Overall, this was a great event, perfectly organized, and a great source of inspiration and idea. Last but not least, this was a great opportunity to pay our tribute to one of the most important members of our community, David S. Warren.